Literature

1. Young Franz didn’t have many friends and assuaged his loneliness by reading the works of J.W. von Goethe, Blaise Pascal, Gustav Flaubert, and Soren Kierkegaard. 2. Before he became known as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, Kafka lived in obscurity, working...

The following piece on poet and Nobel Prize laureate T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), whose birthday is on Sept. 26, was written by Joseph Maddrey, who is contributing a book on Eliot’s life and work for our Great Lives series. Maddrey is a freelance writer, TV producer and author...

Forty-one summers have passed since that once-only event when a single writer, a poet, won the trio of the most prestigious literary awards: Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the same year. His name? John Ashbery (1927–2017),...

To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death on July 18, 1817, the Bank of England is introducing a new £10 banknote featuring the likeness of the celebrated English novelist (1775–1817). The unveiling ceremony of the new bill will take place this Tuesday at...

With his gloom-ridden mind that spawned somber novels and short stories, Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924), whose birthday was celebrated on July 3, seems like an unlikely source of a fun endeavor. But earlier this year, his books—long enjoyed in print, adapted for the big...

On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) took his double-barreled, 12-gauge shotgun, turned it on himself and pulled the trigger. Could his suicide have been prompted by the shame that tormented him after having worked as a Soviet spy? We’ll never know for sure what...

In a soon-to-be-published book titled Simply Tolstoy, which is part of Simply Charly’s Great Lives book series, author Donna Orwin talks about Leo Tolstoy’s (1828-1910) extensive network of relatives and explores his ideas about the importance of family. The renowned author and social reformer could not have known that...

Adolf Hitler was a fascist, Joseph Stalin a totalitarian, and the famous Irish poet, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was both. In his essay, Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats (1965), Irish politician and historian Conor Cruise O’Brien exposed Yeats’...

In the nearly 200 years since her death, British novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817) has never lost her mass appeal. Her standing as a pop culture icon is as enduring as her literary legacy, proven by the occasional emergence of various posthumous intrigues, twists, and theories....